The prior art of camouflage patterns for tactical military equipment and clothing was based on an artistic and subjective determination of geometric shapes intended to conceal identifying characteristics such as shape, shadow, highlights, and the horizontal, vertical, and circular lines which often distinguish manmade items from natural terrain and foliage. Often similar camouflage patterns have been used for widely differing environments for example for arctic and desert locations using the same basic patterns with only color changes to accommodate the different conditions. The basic guidelines in developing these patterns are to avoid designs which show up as the aforesaid vertical, horizontal and circular or as parallel, plaid or zebra type patterns. Heretofore there have been no significant attempts to relate the pattern to the natural shapes and shadows encountered in the different natural backgrounds against which the tactical military equipment is to operate. The development of such patterns has been a continuing empirical effort among NATO countries until the presently developed technique.
Therefore it has become apparent of the need for a novel technique for more scientifically generating camouflage patterns which more nearly resemble the natural background patterns and thus reduce the detectability of the equipment and/or tents and clothing which has been patterned according to this technique. The selected technique involves generating these natural patterns by photographic techniques. Therefore this invention will make it possible to more easily tailor these camouflage patterns to a variety of different tactical environments, based on a photographic process of adjusting the contrast of background photographs to the point where contrast patterns are recognizable, then adopting the contrast patterns usually in two or three color patterns such as in black, light green and forest green, as will be more specifically described hereinafter.